FAR AWAY BUT STRANGELY FAMILIAR
TWENTY-THREE ARTISTS FROM THE PHILIPPINES
An exhibition at Danubiana Museum, Slovakia, 2019.
Danubiana Museum is set on an island in the Danube, downriver from Bratislava. The museum’s main building is shaped like a boat. Far away, but strangely familiar was installed in this building.
The wall texts were in English and Slovak. To give context. To be easily understood. (The texts below are adapted from those wall texts.)
FAR AWAY BUT STRANGELY FAMILIAR
This exhibition brings together 23 of the leading artists from the Philippines. The Philippines is not a tropical paradise though it has beautiful beaches and exceptionally welcoming people. A country invaded in turn by Spanish, Americans and Japanese it only became independent in 1946. It remains the most catholic country in the world, the only one, save the Vatican City, where divorce is not allowed. It suffers from overpopulation, corruption and poverty. These are not, of course, problems unique to the Philippines. Some of these artists respond to these issues or more particular political problems: the current “war on drugs”, attacks on press freedom, the overcrowding of the capital city Manila
The Philippines is perhaps the least Asian country in Asia, the names of streets and people are normally Spanish, English is the second language. The people are not calm, serene Buddhists. Their humour is good natured, but boisterous. In everyday life Filipinos respond to things by being versatile, optimistic and improvising. Many go abroad to make a living, religiously sending back money to their families. The artists are versatile too, working in many media. Well-schooled and informed, ambitious and inventive, as they are, how do the artists of the Philippines represent their world, with its fascination with sentimental tele-novelas, celebrities and beauty contests, its earthquakes and devastating typhoons?
The painting tradition is strong, and often passionate, in the Philippines. And as the artists well aware of what is happening elsewhere it is a sophisticated one. There is also a strong tradition of Conceptual art, of thinking about what art is. “What does it mean to make pictures of things, people, or landscapes?” is a question often asked implicitly in the exhibition.
Fifteen of these twenty-three artists live in Manila, the city other than Warsaw, most devastated in the second world war, today the city with the worst traffic jams in the world. Others live in the country where they know of other types of communities, rooted in the past and can also see evidence of ecological disaster.
What we find in this exhibition are images, some beautiful, some compelling of a country that is very far away, but yet in its concerns is strangely familiar.
Kawayan de Guia, Indio I and Indio II.
‘Since I was a child, I was lucky enough to be exposed to the ways of the Cordilleran people. The large cañaos or thanksgiving feasts where no one was excluded and the whole village participated. The sound of gongs endlessly played alongside a pow-wow like gathering of slow and fast traditional dances, these movements mimicked birds which revolve around the epicentre.
‘There is a saying up here in Baguio that the Ifugao carver starts carving in the womb of his mother. A hundred years ago these carvers made objects and figures for ritual and were highly regarded as artists. After the disruption of the world war many of them moved to Baguio where they started carving again, but this time not “Bulols” or traditional carvings but tourist kitsch, such as deer hunters, Indians, Buddhas and what not. The tourist market of Baguio was alive and new prospects were to be made.
‘These carvings were probably made fifteen years ago for exports to the US but somehow were rejected. I hollow out these Indian figures in search for the lost ancestral spirit… only to find the exotic facade with nothing in them. These for me are the monuments of our time, of a people and their ways no longer around.
‘I finish them up with a neatly engraved cover of bottle caps of beer and Coca Cola, mocking classical European brass sculptures. There are many of these sculptures that honour kings and conquistadors but few the “Indio” or colonized. This one is for all colonized people.’ Kawayan de Guia.
Annie Cabigting, Not a composition in black and white
This painting shows a woman, presumably Filipina, looking at a painting by a dead white man, Piet Mondrian, that is exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Tableau I; Lozenge with four lines and grey, 1926. All her work has been about the experience of people looking at paintings or other works of art. We can see this as a post-colonial statement or just think about what the experience of looking at art really is.
“Salvaged” was the slang used for people abducted and “disappeared” during the Marcos dictatorship.
SALVAGED SHADOWS IN THE THIRD WORLD PURGATORY
When that elusive sanity once abandoned you,
stoked by a soft voice and bestial temptations,
you then grasp the denial of that deep meaning
in the truth of pure terror when staring into nothingness.
In one small and cramped corner of a smoldering cavern,
the curse of prison bars slammed shut is seen,
the bitter kiss of the frigid concrete floor,
scabies, wounds and all grief embrace you tight.
In the gaps of clashing elbows, backs and sides,
the proof that doubts guilt peeks through,
and in every respite of breath, secrets are whispered,
the prayers and sobs of a howling gut.
Here, every drop of time stops twice,
for the mind is bound to a hastened vengeance,
but the soul’s malevolence is defeated again and again,
by the tender tear melted by monotony, drop by slow drop.
That pinch of darkness inside your opened eyes,
holds a throb of repentance in denying desolation,
“Really, how far is my gut from your flesh?
For I truly could not comprehend my reason for being.”
Now is the beginning of the end like a bright light in the wild,
deceptive memories are too blinding to see,
like our first encounter once upon a time but not long ago,
the recollection of you is but the shape of a shadow with a name forgotten.
(Poem in Tagalog by Leslie de Chavez, translated by him)
The Tagalog poem embedded under the gold leaf translates as:
I wish you do not touch me:
Your hands of burning steel
Can dampen the shimmer of pearls
That I so dearly conceal.
I wish you do not stare:
The pupils of your hazy eyes
Are the dagger’s blade through my poor heart,
Pain felt unceasingly.
I wish you do not kiss me:
Your kiss brings danger,
An ominous treachery afoot,
A seduction so venomous.
Buen Calubayan is unusual in being a conceptual artist who also makes full-bloodied paintings. He is fascinated by the vanishing point in paintings and how that conditions the way we read both the painting and the world. It gives us a view of the world and hence of society as something stable and timeless. In this painting we can tell more or less where the horizon is, and hence where the vanishing point is, but we can’t quite pick it out precisely. He talks of ‘seeing the horizon as something no longer necessarily horizontal.’ He is trying to make a painting of landscape that is not stable or timeless but is more about energy and the process of time. He talks of ‘how time can be implicated in space’.
He wants us not just to enjoy the painting but also to read and think about what the act of looking means. This why he adds a text to the paintings and also makes large text works such as the two here.
The Filipino painter Juan Luna won the first gold prize in the 1884 Exposicíon Nacional de Bellas Artes in Madrid for his painting Spolarium. Fellow Filipinos hailed it as showing that a man with dark skin could paint as well as one with white. The painting has become a national icon for the Philippines: dead gladiators dragged of the arena to be stripped of their armour are seen as emblematic of the colonial persecution of Filipinos. Schoolchildren, police and army cadets are taken to see the Spolarium in Manila’s National Gallery as an inducement to patriotism.
Buen Calubayan has made a series of paintings based on this work, which was badly damaged and darkened in a fire. His interest is not only in the way this painting has become an icon, but also how the painting represented space.
Spolarium by Juan Luna is the iconic nineteenth century painting of the Philippines. In a series of six paintings, (one included here on your right) he has re-imagined what the painting looked like before being damaged in a fire. He has also speculated on what the painting means, what associations it carries and how such a painting can affect the way we see the world.
Watching the videos of Manila traffic under Poklong Anading’s two tents entitled Bandilang Basahan (Flag of Rags) we see the round stitched-together rags, basahan or trapos, bowl along the road, caught in the slipstreams of the vehicles rushing by, or spin away under them in the dust. The term trapos is also slang for traditional politicians, that is to say, corrupt ones. The tents are made if these same rags – trapos.
Anading is a conceptual artist but one who also likes painting. ‘I like the materiality of it,’ he says, ‘as well as the ideas behind it, so I like to go back to focus on thick paint. This use of impasto goes back to the idea of dust. The painting is a collector of dust. They are two opposing ideas: rags and dust. The function of one is to collect, of the other to wipe it away.’
A few years back Jose Santos was caught in a traffic jam in Manila. This is, sadly, a very common occurrence. He began to think about both the road and the traffic he was surrounded by as a metaphor for movement and change, but going nowhere. When he finally got home he went around the roads near to his house taking photographs of road surfaces. This work, a road going nowhere, is made of them.
Maya Muñoz lived and studied in California before returning to the Philippines, where she initially worked as a farmer. She now lives in Manila. Her work owes much to the USA. In these paintings she has used fragments of many old drawings to create multi layered paintings filled with the light and imagery that surrounds her in her daily life.
Jill Paz was born in the Philippines but her family left for the USA when she was one year old. They returned once a year and would stay for a month or so in the old family house, where there were many paintings and drawings by her great-grand-uncle, the renowned artist Félix Resurrecíon Hidalgo, seen together with Juan Luna as the founder of Filipino painting. Two years ago she came back too live in the Philippines.
In America Hidalgo was barely a footnote in art history, but in the Philippines, he was seen as a great master. What did this mean?
She takes images of Hidalgo paintings and transfers them via a laser printer to what she calls a ‘substratum’ made from unfolded balikbayan boxes.
Balikbayan boxes are another icon of Filipino culture. These are the boxes that Filipino OFWs (Overseas Foreign Workers) fill with toys, foodstuffs, candies and other luxuries and send to their relatives back home. To Paz the balikbayan box is the pre-eminent symbol of the Filipino diaspora. Her sculpture here is an actual balikbayan box, but inside is drawn an image of the family living room. As ever, the Hidalgo paintings are here, though they appear as blanks.
As well as acrylic Mariano Ching uses a Pirograph to burn and scorch the surface of these sculptures. Rather than resin he uses wood, paper or wax because he prefers organic materials.
Louie Cordero tells us his language is ‘the realm of B horror movies, catholic blood gore, comics, artisan signage, kitsch etc. which I was brought up on when I was a kid. It’s how I reflect and vomit stuff out of my head.’
‘I often get the urge to collage. It is more fun to collage than paint – great fun! A certain part of my brain clicks in when I start to collage. It is not unlike mediating. There is a certain rhythm when it is going well and you are getting it right. I know when I am doing it well.’
The five small paintings are based on other, smaller collages, in which she uses a lot of cuttings from children’s books, and other paper scraps. She mainly uses books from the Sixties because she prefers the textures and colour of books printed before the pre-computer age. Invariably, she wants the feel of hand-made things. But this is not for her a nostalgia trip or about kitsch. It is about a play on shapes and colours.
Kiri Dalena found photographs of people protesting against the Marcos regime before the enforcement of martial law and the end of press freedom in 1972; she digitally erased the slogans on their banners. In her images we can see that people were protesting but we cannot know what they were protesting against. She has talked about how these works represent enforced silence. But they still demonstrate discontent. They show there was discontent with the system and make you ask what that was – or is.
Nilo Ilarde never throws anything away, he just recycles it. Most of the things and materials he uses are of no value: old paint taken from failed paintings, those sticks that other artists have used to stir paint in the can, old paint brushes. Even objects such children’s jigsaws, blackboards or rulers that have been bought for a few pesos in a thrift store. It is about transforming things of little value into something witty and elegant. The way he has embedded the collage in the mount is a tribute to his teacher Roberto Chabet.
One way for male dancers to make a living is to do “Macho Dancing” in the gay bars of Manila. It is a uniquely Filipino form of dance. Here Eisa Jocson both explains how to do it and performs it herself. Just as she breaks assumptions by dressing brown skinned Filipinas as Snow White, (see upstairs) so by enacting a dance specifically for men as a woman she is unpicking assumptions about what is male or female.
Anito (ancestor spirit/ pre-hispanic belief system)
‘An animistic festival Christianized and incorporated into Folk Catholicism slowly turns into modern day madness. The Ati-atihan festival means, “to be like Aetas” or “make believe Ati’s.” The Aeta people are thought to be among the earliest inhabitants of the Philippines, preceding the Austronesian migrations some 30,000 years ago. Through all influences throughout it’s history, the Philippines is at another turning point of using the influences of ancestral belief, with their catholic religion together with their strive for survival, search for identity and need for creativity. Provoked by current events and experiences – super typhoons, Manny Pacquiao’s boxing match, the Papal visit, labour migration – participants take to the streets and assume another persona. Inspired by their ancestors they become powerful, god-like and mad. This video is a compilation of eight years of filming the same Ati-atihan festival. Each year I film this festival in my community just as I film all else. I use the camera to hold on as everything around me has changed drastically in my life-time. This work grows as it turns into an archive.’ Martha Atienza
Filmed on the island of Bantayan where she lives.